Movies that inspire
Most influential movies
Since the inception of the motion picture, movies have become the preffered form of entertainment. The rather short history of movies has left us, just like in the case of the other arts, with a variety of criteria to appreciate them. We have emotional movies, beautiful films, films that display acting talent and skill, films depicting romance, tragedy, the beauty of fiction or ideals about life in general.
But there also another kind of movies, those that inspire by showing a face of life that we don’t really think about, challenging the things we thought we knew, spinning them and weaving them in a whole new perspective. I present those that have been the most important to me, in no particular order.
Dead poets society / Finding Forrester: two movies revolving around the art of writing and the human spirit, the way the spirit finds the power of expression in words. One presents the tragedy of the incarcerated soul, the other presents the exhilaration of a writer finding his way. Both have provided me with great inspiration in findng my way to a world of words and imagination, but a world of words full of meaning.
Hotel Rwanda / Sometimes in April: the year 1994 witnessed the second greatest failure of the UN as an international body after its failure to prevent Israel from occupying arab land and provoking the longest running conflict since World War II. In april of 1994, the Hutu majority in Rwanda unleashed a horrible massacre against the Tutsi minority benefitting from French support, a massacre that left around a million people dead. Of the two movies, “Sometimes in April” combines the international efforts to do nothing about Rwanda with the personal accounts of various survivors of those days while “Hotel Rwanda” tells the story of Rwandan hero Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the “Des Milles Collines” hotel in Kigali who, alongside UN general Dallaire managed to save a few thousand people from the slaughter. The most powerful moment of the movie is, in my opinion, the discussion between Paul Rusesabagina and a BBC reporter there:
Paul: “I am glad that you have shown this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have a chance that people will intervene”
Reporter: “And if no one intervenes, at least it’s something good to show”
Paul: “How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?”
Reporter: “I think when people see this footage they will say: oh my god this is horrible and they go on eating their dinners”
Unfortunately this is the way the world works when facing atrocities. For some it is good show, others refuse to look, but regardless of reason, they will all prefer to ignore the problem, leaving innocents to die through inaction.
Lord of War / Blood Diamond: two powerful movies about two ever present conflictual problems. Yuri Orlov is a small time arms dealer who works his way to the top without remorse for what his guns do, preoccupied only to finance his business. His trading takes away his family, decimated by bullets and deception, yet in the end he walks free, leaving behind the warning that small-time dealers are only tools for a black market fed by the big states. In “Blood Diamond”, Danny Archer is a former mercenary trying to pay a debt to his former commander, colonel Coetzee. Although predictable, this movie digs deep into the trading of blood diamonds, illegal diamonds used to finance a continuous war in poor African countries, wars that have killed many millions.